The making of an imagined community: The press as a mediator in ethnographic research into Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept of community as a methodological tool in the absence of a face-to-face interaction context. Our perspective emphasizes the constitutive role of the researcher and his or her methods in creating communities in any kind of social research. In our case study of research that we conducted in a private medical centre in Barcelona, we show how Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) users were ‘imagined’ as a community through the use of press clippings as mediation tool in the ethnographic interview.